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A government committee recommends a change in German law to enable public administrations to make their software available as free and open source. The current law prohibits governments from being part of the development process in the free software community.

The council of the government of the autonomous province of Trentino on Wednesday morning approved a law on free and open source software and open data. The law instructs public administrations to prepare migrations plans to switch to free and open source software and to make its software applications available as open source.

The newly elected German government plans to support open standards and open source software. In its four-year coalition contract, the government led by chancellor Angela Merkel, writes it wants to orient its IT systems on open standards and include open source solutions.

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Theseus, the German government-funded program to develop new semantic Web technologies, will launch a competition in November to attract talented software programmers, including experts from the open-source community.

The free and open source software community has witnessed, over and over again, how far a visit to the right government officials can go. Bill Gates seems to know the game, and what cards he should play in every occasion to “make things happen”.

Some government entities put up fierce resistance to free software because they do not want to run afoul of ethics laws that prohibit them from accepting gifts - if free software has value, then government officials are not allowed to receive the code without paying for it.

Because of the German federal elections in 2009, FSFE called on all German Free Software supporters to ask the parties’ candidates about their positions on Free Software and Open Standards. FSFE set up a page about the German Bundestagswahl to help asking questions, and to collecting answers.

Free/Open Source software is great for Public Administrations, but Free/Open data are even more important. Making public sector information really accessible, that is publishing online raw data in open formats and under open licenses, can both improve transparency in government and foster local economical and cultural activities.